CHAPTER XXIBACK HOME AGAIN
Nowwe must pack up our troubles in our little black bag and go home. They must be lonesome for us at 11 East Fourteenth, for the studio has been dark and silent in our absence. Mr. Dougherty especially will be glad to see us. And others—the jobless actors. For things were coming along now so that Mr. Griffith didn’t have to dig so hard for new talent.
Much talk there’ll be about the pictures we did—how the public is receiving them—which ones are most popular—how worthwhile the trip was—how economical we were—and how hard we worked.
When once again we had donned our working harness, how stuffy and cramped the studio seemed! Four months in the open had ruined us; four months with only a white sheet suspended above our heads when we did “interiors” on our lot and the sun was too strong. We felt now like toadstools in a dark cellar, with neither sun nor fresh air.
There was so much to keep Mr. Griffith busy—cutting and titling of pictures, and conferences upstairs. But the blossoming pink and white apple orchards must be heeded, so we deserted a few days, hied ourselves to New Jersey’s old stone houses and fruit trees and friendly hens, and did a picture “In the Season of Buds.”
Dorothy West played a leading part in “A Child of the Ghetto,” in which was featured more Eastern atmosphere—the old oaken bucket.
For a time we stayed indoors. We acquired a new actor, Joseph Graybill, and a few old ones returned, Vernon Clarges and Mrs. Grace Henderson, Jim Kirkwood and Gertrude Robinson. They now played leading parts. The public must not get fed up with the same old faces—Mr. Griffith always saw to that—so it was “go easy” on the California actors for a while.
The feeling of the old actors towards the new ones, this spring, was largely a jealous one. “Gee, Griff likes him all right, what are we going to do about it?” said Charlie West and Arthur Johnson when Joe Graybill was having his first rehearsals and the director was beaming with satisfaction and so happy that he was singing lusty arias from “Rigoletto.”
“We’ll fix him,” they decided.
So this day Charlie and Arthur returned from lunch with a small brown bottle containing spiritous liquor, with which they would ply Joe Graybill surreptitiously in the men’s dressing-room in the hope that they might incapacitate him. But Joe drank up, rehearsed, and Mr. Griffith’s smile only grew broader. Better than ever was the rehearsal. So Charles went out for another little brown bottle and Joe disposed of it, and rehearsed—better still. Another bottle, another rehearsal—better than ever—until in a blaze of glory the scene was taken and Joe Graybill stood upon the topmost rung of the ladder, leaving Charles and Arthur gazing sadly upward.
There was another reason why Mr. Griffith welcomed new faces. He had a way of not letting an actor get allworked up about himself. When that seemed imminent, new talent would suddenly appear on the scene to play “leads” for two or three weeks so that the importance of the regular could simmer down a bit.
Now that they had developed an affection for their movie jobs, the actors didn’t like this so well. They’d come down to the studio, sit around and watch, get nervous, and after drawing three or four weeks’ salary without working (things had come along apace), they wouldn’t know what to make of it. They’d carry on something awful. They’d moan: “When am I going to work? I don’t like this loafing—I wonder if Griffith doesn’t like me any more—I’d like to know if he wants me to quit and this is his way of getting me to make the overture.” Finally, Eddie August, after suffering three weeks of idleness, on pay, got very brave and told Mr. Griffith he wished he’d fire him or else, for God’s sake, use him. Mr. August was quite relieved to have Mr. Griffith’s explanation that in his case he was merely trying out new people, and didn’t want him to quit at all, would be very glad to have him stay.
When the Black-eyed Susans had reached full bloom, we went back to Greenwich, Connecticut, and did a picture called “What the Daisy Said,” with Mary Pickford and Gertrude Robinson. We visited Commodore Benedict’s place again, and again he brought out boxes of his best cigars. A good old sport he was.
To the Civil War again, in the same old New Jersey setting, with Dorothy West playing the heroine in “The House with the Closed Shutters.” In her coward brother’s clothes she takes his place on the battlefield, breaks through the lines, delivers a message, and is shot as she returns. And, forever after, inside the darkened rooms of the Housewith the Closed Shutters the brother pays through bitter years the price of his cowardice.
All our old stamping grounds we revisited this summer. At the Atlantic Highlands we did two pictures: one, “A Salutary Lesson,” with Marion Leonard; and the other, “The Sorrows of the Unfaithful,” with Mary Pickford.
At Paterson, New Jersey, we found a feudal castle. It belonged to one Mr. Lambert, a silk manufacturer. Here we did “The Call to Arms” where little Mary donned tights for the first and only time, playing a page, and looking picturesque on a medieval horse, but being a very unhappy Mary for a reason that none of us knew.
How she fussed about those tights—nearly shed tears. She sat on the lawn all wrapped up in the generous folds of her velvet cape, and wouldn’t budge until she was called for her scene, and she talked so strangely. For Owen was there, and all the other actors were to see her in the tights, and Mary and Owen had a secret—a secret that made such a situation quite unbearable. She had confided it only to “Doc,” but the rest of us had been wondering.
What a miserable, hot, muggy day it was. Tolerable only sitting on the grassy slopes of the Lambert estate, but how awful in the rooms of the little frame hotel over by the railroad tracks where we had made up and where some of the actors were still awaiting orders as to how they should dress.
Dell Henderson, who was assisting Mr. Griffith on this picture, was laboring back and forth from the castle to the hotel bringing orders to the waiting actors as they were needed. Sennett was one of the waiting ones, and he was all humped up in his pet grouch when Dell entered and said, “Here, Sennett, the boss says for you to don this armor.”
“Armor, in this heat? Armor? I guess I won’t wear armor.” Then a short pause, “Are you going to wear armor?”
“Yes, I’m no teacher’s pet,” said Dell, as he gathered to himself the pieces of his suit of mail and began to climb into them. So the doubting Mack Sennett could do naught but imitate him, for no matter how balky his manner, one word from the boss and he became a good little boy again.
In August we were once more back in Cuddebackville. The O. and W.’s conductor was no longer skeptical of our visits. We brought so many actors sometimes that we not only filled the little Inn but had to find neighboring farmhouses in which to park the overflow.
We met all the old Cuddebacks again. We never realized what a tribe they were until we had to do a scene in a cemetery, and every grave we picked made trouble for us with some Cuddeback or other still living. How to get away with it we didn’t know until we hit upon the idea of simultaneously enacting a fake but intensely melodramatic scene down by the General Store. That did the trick. All the villagers missed their lunch that day and were unaware of the desecration of their dead.
“Wally” Walthall gave his famous fried chicken luncheon at the minister’s house. Talent was versatile. We’d worked through our lunch hour this day, so it was either go lunchless or beg the privilege of slaughtering some of the minister’s wife’s tempting spring chickens and cooking them in her kitchen. That’s how “Wally” had the opportunity to prove his fried chicken the equal of any Ritz-Carlton’s.
We met up with old Pete again. Although nearly ninety, he was worrying his faithful spouse into a deepand dark melancholia. Pete drove the big bus, rigged up for our use out of one of his old farm wagons. It was usually filled with “actresses”—wicked females from the city who wore gay clothes and put paint on their faces. What a good time old Pete did have once out on the highway! What a chatter, chatter, chatter he did maintain! Never had he dreamed of such intimacy with ladies out of a the-ayter!
But a wife was ever a wife. So no matter how old and decrepit Pete was, to Mrs. Pete he still had charm, so why wouldn’t he be alluring to these city girls? Every night Mrs. Pete was Johnny-on-the-spot, when the bus unloaded its quota of fair femininity at the Inn, waiting to lead her errant swain right straight home.
Our friends the Goddefroys still held open house for us. Dear old Mr. Goddefroy told us of the disquieting notes that had crept into Cuddebackville’s former tranquil life, due to our lavish expenditures the first summer—told Mr. Griffith he was “knocking the place to hell.”
But they still loved us. In a smart little trap they’d jog over to location bringing buckets of fresh milk and boxes of apples and pears. Toward late afternoon of a warm summer day, when working close to their elaborate “cottage,” the “Boss” would appear with bottles of Bass’s Ale, and bottles of C-and-C Ginger Ale, both of which he’d pour over great chunks of ice into a great shining milk bucket—shandygaff! Was it good? For the simple moving picture age in which we were living we seemed to get a good deal out of life.
We enjoyed the other social diversions of the year before—canoeing, motoring, table-tipping. But one night, the night on which the Macpherson magicians broke up Mr.Griffith’s beautiful sleep, nearly saw the end of table-tipping.
Retiring early after a hard day David was awakened by noisy festivities downstairs, and getting good and mad about it he rapped a shoe on the floor. The group on occult demonstration bent, thinking how wonderfully their spooks were working, instead of quieting down became hilarious. The morning found them much less optimistic about spirit rapping.
We did an Irish story of the days when the harp rang through Tara’s Hall—the famous “Wilful Peggy”—in which pretty Mary never looked prettier nor acted more wilfully. But the something that had happened to Mary since our first visits to Cuddebackville made her a different Mary now.
One day we were idling over by the Canal bank when, with the most wistful expression and in the most wistful tone, Mary spoke, “You know, Mrs. Griffith, I used to think this canal was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, and now it just seems to me like a dirty, muddy stream.”
What had happened to her love’s young dream to so change the scenery for her?
Early that fall we went to Mount Beacon to do an Indian picture. The hotel on the mountain top had been closed, but we dug up the owner and he reopened parts of the place. At night we slid down the mountainside in the incline railway car to the village of Fishkill where we dined and slept at a regular city hotel.
We nearly froze on that mountain top. Playing Indians, wrapped up in warm Indian blankets, and thus draped picturesquely on the mountainside, saved us. Mrs. Smith, not yet Pickford, did an Indian squaw in this picture, whichfeatured a picturesque character, one Dark Cloud, for years model to the artist Remington. Dark Cloud was sixty years old, but had the flexible, straight, slim figure of nineteen. How beautifully he interpreted the Harvest Festival dance!
There were other actor-Indians on this Mount Beacon picture, present-day celebrities who were thanking their stars they were being Indians with woolly blankets to pose in. There were Henry Walthall and Lily Cahill and Jeanie Macpherson and Jim Kirkwood and Donald Crisp, among others.
Donald Crisp had crept quietly into the Biograph fold as Donald Somebody Else. Occasionally, he authored poems inThe Smart Set—reason for being Donald Somebody Else in the movies. Of late, Mr. Crisp has rather neglected poetry for the movies. He gave the screen his greatest acting performance asBattling Burrowsin Mr. Griffith’s artistic “Broken Blossoms.”
The night that “Way Down East” opened in New York in 1920 (September 3) Donald was radiant among the audience saying his farewells, for on the morrow he was to sail for England to take charge of the Famous Players studio there, where he put on among other things “Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush.”
Claire MacDowell and her husband, Charles Mailes, joined Biograph this season. Stephanie Longfellow returned to play in more pictures; Alfred Paget began to play small parts, as did Jeanie Macpherson; also beautiful Florence LaBadie, who afterwards became a fan favorite through Thannhouser’s startlingly successful serial “The Million Dollar Mystery.” As one of the four principals, along with James Cruze of “The Covered Wagon” fame, Sidney Bracy and Marguerite Snow, she attracted much attention.A job as model to Howard Chandler Christie had preceded her venture into the movies. Her tragic death, the result of a motor accident, occurred in 1917.
Edwin August came, to look handsome in costume, playing his first part with Lucy Cotton (recently married to E. R. Thomas) in “The Fugitive,” taken on Mount Beacon. Mabel Normand, who had peeked in on us the year before, returned after a winter spent with Vitagraph.
Mabel, as every one knows, had been responsible for the lovely magazine covers by James Montgomery Flagg, and had also been model to Charles Dana Gibson, before she came to pictures, which had happened through friendship for Alice Joyce, who had also been a model, but was now leading lady at the Kalem Company. It was at Kalem, playing extras, that Mabel Normand began her rather startling movie career. Dorothy Bernard made a screen début, as did the other Dorothy who afterward became the wife of Wallace Reid.
I recall Dorothy Davenport at the Delaware Water Gap where we took some pictures that fall. She was a modish little person; she wore brown pin-check ginghams and a huge brown taffeta bow on the end of a braid of luxurious brown hair that fluttered down her back. She looked as though she came direct from Miss Prim’s boarding school for children of the élite—and so was distinctive for the movies.
Fair Lily Cahill of the tailored blue serge, plain straw “dude,” and lady-like veil worked intermittently that summer; she was always immaculately bloused in “sun-kissed linen.” Not long after the days of the Water Gap and Mount Beacon Indian pictures, Miss Cahill became a Broadway leading woman in support of that long-time matinéeidol, Brandon Tynon, and somewhere along in this period she married him.
Henry Lehrman, alias Pathé, hung about. How he loved being a near-actor! How he adored getting fixed up for a picture! He was satisfied by now that his make-ups were works of art. From the dressing-room he would emerge patting his swollen chest, with the laconic remark, “Some make-up!”
Eddie Dillon returned, to smile his way through more studio days. He often engaged me in long converse. Eddie was quite flabbergasted when he learned my matrimonial status. He need not have been. For in Los Angeles on Mr. Griffith’s busy evenings he often suggested my taking in a movie with Eddie. But Eddie never knew about that.
And there was Lloyd Carlton, who went all around the mulberry bush before he landed in the movies. He first heard of them in far-off Australia in 1908, when as stage manager for “Peter Pan” he met a Mr. West, who was “doing” Australia and the Far East with a “show” that consisted of ten-and fifteen-foot moving pictures, toting the films and projection machine and the whole works along with him. Back on home soil, Mr. Carlton bobbed up at Biograph where instead of Mr. Frohman’s one hundred and fifty dollars weekly he cheerfully pocketed five dollars per day for doing character bits. Followed Thannhouser, Lubin, and Mr. Fox.
Mary Pickford’s first picture, “The Violin Maker of Cremona,” June 7, 1909. David Miles as the cripple Felippo.(Seep. 100)
Mary Pickford’s first picture, “The Violin Maker of Cremona,” June 7, 1909. David Miles as the cripple Felippo.(Seep. 100)
Mary Pickford’s first picture, “The Violin Maker of Cremona,” June 7, 1909. David Miles as the cripple Felippo.
(Seep. 100)
Mary Pickford’s second picture. Mary Pickford, Marion Leonard and Adele De Garde, in “The Lonely Villa.”(Seep. 100)
Mary Pickford’s second picture. Mary Pickford, Marion Leonard and Adele De Garde, in “The Lonely Villa.”(Seep. 100)
Mary Pickford’s second picture. Mary Pickford, Marion Leonard and Adele De Garde, in “The Lonely Villa.”
(Seep. 100)
Mr. Carlton says he directed the first five-reel picture ever released—“Through Fire to Fortune”—written by Clay Greene and released March 2, 1914, by the General Film Company. Mr. Carlton also says his picture contained the first night scene. Through crude lighting manipulations Mr. Carlton secured it in the quarry at Betzwood where rocks were painted black and properties arranged to represent the interior of a mine.
* * * * *
And so from near and far, and from diverging avenues of endeavor, came the new recruits to Biograph; but in the late fall Mary and Owen, and the Smith family sailed for Cuba one fine day to produce some “Imp” pictures there. When safe aboard the steamer, Mary and Owen decided to brave mother’s tears and anguish. They told her of the secret marriage.
Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett in “An Arcadian Maid,” Aug. 1, 1910.(Seep. 78)
Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett in “An Arcadian Maid,” Aug. 1, 1910.(Seep. 78)
Mary Pickford and Mack Sennett in “An Arcadian Maid,” Aug. 1, 1910.
(Seep. 78)
Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Joe Graybill and Marion Sunshine, in “The Italian Barber,” which established Joe Graybill.(Seep. 174)
Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Joe Graybill and Marion Sunshine, in “The Italian Barber,” which established Joe Graybill.(Seep. 174)
Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, Joe Graybill and Marion Sunshine, in “The Italian Barber,” which established Joe Graybill.
(Seep. 174)